A blog talking about school, video games, video game development and my random travels.

Monday, August 12, 2013

European Research Exchange - Complex Event Processing

So this week was pretty standard in the sense that it was just like, another week. I've been in Berlin for pretty much 3.5 months now, and I've settled into a pretty decent, uh, lifestyle? Not sure what word I'm looking for haha.

Anyways, I figure since I didn't really anything special this week I'd talk a bit about the work I've been doing here in Berlin. I haven't really mentioned it much, but I'm in Berlin because I'm on a research exchange, so for the last 3.5 months I've been working at the Freie University of Berlin.

The thing with being a Game Dev student is that there aren't as many Game Dev related research projects as there are regular Comp Sci stuff, so I've been working here at the Corporate Semantic Web group on complex event processing (CEP).

Complex event processing is like, well, the processing of complex events haha. Events happen everywhere, and figuring out patterns and stuff related to a stream or collection of events can result in valuable data. A good example is the stock market. A discrete value at a certain time is meaningless, but if you are given a group of data, you can extract information from it and it's a lot more meaningful.

So my main project here is working in Java (ugh) with the Esper EPL engine. Essentially what I've worked on so far consists of a bunch of different modules. At a high level, essentially I have a class that generates a stream of events, another class that processes the stream of events, and a few other ones which do calculations related to the stream.

The goal here is to essentially measure the effects of different variables on the efficiency of the Esper engine and to figure out how certain variables influence the amount of complex events that are detected.

This is my favourite class, just because I'm a sucker for string manipulation.

So in my time here that's the primary thing I've been working on. Making classes, adding features to them, making sure they work, etc. The goal now is to get it running on a separate server so experiments can be done.

My supervisor wants to write a paper on this stuff, which is pretty cool. It would be nice to get a paper for my work. Granted even if I didn't, I still learned a decent amount. Obviously now I know a lot more about CEP and it has refreshed and developed my Java skills and introduced me to Esper EPL.

So this should be my last week here at FU, so hopefully everything will go pretty smoothly so I can just wrap things up. The plan is to take the last two weeks off before I go back to Canada so I can just kinda relax and chill in Berlin plus do some travelling.

I'm pretty hyped actually since yesterday I finally got everything finalized for my trip to Gamescom in Cologne. Pretty psyched for that since the WCS season finals are gonna be held there, so it's gonna be a fantastic weekend of games and eSports.